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Robert F. Kennedy's Last Day in Berlin is Emotional

Feb. 23, 1962 - Attorney General Robert Kennedy, on the last day of his official visit to West Berlin, continued to draw large and admiring crowds. This morning, the Attorney General saw Bernauerstrasse, where houses backing up to the western border have had their windows bricked up by the Communists. The Attorney General laid a wreath at the spot where an elderly woman was killed trying to leap to freedom last summer. The West Berliners have erected a memorial there of barbed wire. Mr. Kennedy said: “I was very moved by the wall, seeing the places where people jumped and lost their lives, seeing the shame on the faces of some of the guards on the other side, the people at the windows there furtively waving, and on this side the look of courage and hope on the faces of West Berliners.” The Attorney General also laid a wreath at the Plötzensee memorial to the victims of the Nazis. In this building, participants in the unsuccessful July 20, 1944 plot against Hitler were hanged. Mayor Willy Brandt of West Berlin, who was with Attorney General Kennedy, called for an “uncompromising battle against tyranny of all kinds.”

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